Wednesday, 28 October 2015

"The Disintegrated Systems of Spark's Complaint Management Systems"

To maintain their survival, corporations should be able to respond well to the needs of their customers. When serving the customers, it is important for a corporation to have an integrated process. This process is usually supported with IT systems. However, sometimes companies have an extant process before, then the IT systems come. The next problem is usually a corporation has already implemented a legacy system or an old IT platform before and then it has to implement a new technology platform to serve business needs. However, this new platform sometimes could not be integrated easily with the legacy or old system. Therefore, it is not unusual in practice that a company still operates disintegrated IT systems to serve its customers. This company also has to maintain many redundant IT systems that could not communicate each other. Thus, it becomes very difficult to manage IT systems like these since the complexity of these disintegrated IT systems. However, to maintain its survival and to compete with other companies in the recent global environment, a company should continuously initiate the integration initiatives. A company may not just leave their disintegrated IT systems as it is. It could give bad corporate image and customers in the long run will leave this company.Corporations that are operated using high tech should understand about the need to integrate their IT systems, especially a company that has determined Internet services as its core business. However, what I learned from Spark was not like that. Whilst the main business of Spark is Internet services, it has a difficulty to integrate its systems. I had experience with these disintegrated systems when complaining about my broadband connection using the Spark Chat. I had already contacted the Spark Call Center before. They had log in the case. In the next day, I wanted to check the follow up of my complaint using the Spark Chat. I asked the operator who was chatting with me whether there was a record about my complaint. Unfortunately, the operator told me that he could not read the records because he did not have access to the other systems. In practice, the main job of Spark Chat's operator only to record the complaints again and ask other people in Spark to contact back the customers through the Spark Call Center. Poorly, if we have already shared the problems to the Spark Chat, the person who contacts us from the Spark Call Center will ask again what is the problem because this new person does not have access to the records in the Spark Chat's conversation.I think if Spark people want to maintain their business, they need to integrate their systems especially the systems that have direct contact or interaction with customers, such as the Spark's complaint management systems. The systems in the Spark Chat, the Spark Call Center, and the other systems in Spark should be integrated so they could serve customers better, efficiently and effectively.